We’ve been branding things from cattle, to jewellery and even people for thousands of years. We began by burning our mark into things to signal ownership. When technology and infrastructure gave us access to things beyond our villages branding began to signal a different type of belonging, one that said ‘you can trust this because it has my mark on it’.

When you think about a modern day brand like Dyson what words immediately spring to mind?
Innovative, reliable, trusted, cutting edge, best, leader and on and on.

Even if you don’t own a Dyson product or know the company’s backstory (5,000+ failed prototypes to multi-billion dollar business), you have a sense of the brand. The Dyson brand is more than just a label or an identifier of the products the company makes. It’s an emotional anchor to those products and while a label can be assigned or attached, an emotional anchor is earned.
A great brand is not a mark burned into a product, it’s something we want to belong to.

And so it goes for your brand too.

What words and emotions do you want people to associate with your brand? And what promises will you have to make and keep in order for that to happen?

Image by vanou.